About James
James Grant, financial journalist and historian, is the founder and editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, a twice-monthly journal of the investment markets. His book, The Forgotten Depression, 1921: The Crash that Cured Itself, a history of America’s last governmentally unmedicated business-cycle downturn, won the 2015 Hayek Prize of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. His latest book, Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian, was published in 2019.
Among his other books on finance and financial history are Bernard M. Baruch: The Adventures of a Wall Street Legend (Simon & Schuster, 1983), Money of the Mind (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992), Minding Mr. Market (Farrar, Straus, 1993), The Trouble with Prosperity (Times Books, 1996), and Mr. Market Miscalculates (Axios Press, 2008).
He is, in addition, the author of a pair of political biographies: John Adams: Party of One, a life of the second president of the United States (Farrar, Straus, 2005) and Mr. Speaker! The Life and Times of Thomas B. Reed, the Man Who Broke the Filibuster (Simon & Schuster, 2011). “Friends Until the End,” a double biography of the 18th century English statesmen Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox, will be published in 2025.
Mr. Grant’s television appearances include “60 Minutes,” “Squawk Box,” “CBS Evening News,” and a 10-year stint on “Wall Street Week”. His journalism has appeared in a variety of periodicals, including Foreign Affairs, The Claremont Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. He contributed an essay to the sixth and seventh editions of Graham and Dodd’s Security Analysis (McGraw-Hill, 2009 and 2023).
Mr. Grant, a former Navy gunner’s mate, is a Phi Beta Kappa alumnus of Indiana University. He earned a master’s degree in international relations from Columbia University, began his career in journalism in 1972, at the Baltimore Sun and joined the staff of Barron’s in 1975. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He and his wife, Patricia Kavanagh M.D., live in Brooklyn. They are the parents of four grown children.
